User blog:DoctorBleed/Introducing: The CreepScore!
A DougScore is a system created by Doug DeMuro as a way to review cars. Rated by ten categories, five of them analyze a car's practical qualities while the other five review the cars more superficial, "fun" qualities. Every individual category is a scale of 1 (or maybe even zero?) to 10. The five from each different category are added up to create a "Daily Score" for practicality and a "Weekend Score" for fun. Finally, the two scores are added up to a "Total Score." In theory, this means a car could get perfect tens in all the practical scores, but nothing but goose eggs in the fun ones, or vice versa. It's unnecessarily complicated, completely arbitrary, utterly subjective and pretty much useless for anything other than pure entertainment. But, most importantly: it's really, really fun and a really interesting way to review a thing and add numbers together. I first learned about it from a YouTube cooking show called "Binging With Babish" where the host inexplicably applied the concept to a dollar-store junk food sandwich based on a Family Guy joke (it's a long story.) Anyway, I thought it was hilarious and really fun. Recently, I mulled over a joke review where I applied the DougScore to Creepypasta stories. This led me down a rabbit hole where I ended up completely remaking the DougScore to apply to creepypasta. I call it "The Creep Score." To test it out, I'm going to apply it to three classic Creepypasta stories and see how they stack up. How It Works Weekday Scores: Important fundemental elementals for writing. Just about every story * Quality: How well-written the story is from a technical standpoint. Grammar, syntax and even spelling apply. * Pacing: How well-paced the story is. How it flows from one story beat to the next. * Structure: The general length of the story, the prose and how it's laid out. Readability, basically. * Practicality: How the story handles its subject matter. How believable, logical or compelling the story is. * Characterization: The characters in the story and how well they're written. Even a setting can be a character! Weekend Scores: Fun, silly stuff that adds to the entertainment value of the story from a subjective point of view rather than a technical or analytical one. * Scares: How scary a story is, from concept, horror moments right down to the horror punchline. * Cool Factor: How much cool crap is in a story. Swords, guns, monsters, cool clothes, whatever. * Weirdness: The amount of freaky, bizarre stuff that happens in a story. * Fun: How entertaining a story is, for any reason. Whether it's bad enough to be good or just plain ol' good. * Uniqueness: How different a story is from other stories in the genre, for better or worse. "If this story were a car..." A final summary of the overall quality and appeal of the story, comparing it to a real life vehicle, sometimes using the actual DougScore as a reference. Without further ado, let's begin. Candle Cove Plot Synopsis: A group of people on an online forum discuss their memories of a strange public access television show with puppet pirates. The more information they manage to recall, the more sinister and unnerving the show becomes. Weekday Scores Quality gets a comfortable 8/10. There are no major problems with the way the story is written or laid out, though there's nothing mind-blowing about the writing techniques, descriptions or dialogue. It does exactly what it needs to do, and it does it all well. Pacing gets a perfect 10/10. The way the story slowly builds up its narrative and progressively gets weirder and creepier as it goes on is so masterful they should write it down in textbooks. It does a great job building a world, progressively getting darker and eventually hitting you hard with the scares and the ending twist. Well done! Structure is a 9/10. The way it's all laid out as a series of forum posts is a very unique and clever way of telling the story, and each entry is short, concise and gets the information out as efficiently as possible. Of course, its uniqueness might just be a turn off to some people who aren't used to reading a story divided into such sparse segments. Practicality is another perfect 10. You'll have absolutely no issues reading this story from start to finish, it borders on micro-fiction. Every fake forum post flows effortlessly from one to the next and follows the natural structure of any forum conversation. Characterization gets a simply 7/10. While the setup and setting are both really neat and the show is extremely fascinating and lovingly written the lack of any actual protagonist or human characters to follow definitely stands out. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but we have to take it in as a factor. Weekend Scores Scares gets a perfect 10. The great little story beats, the stuff like the rotting puppets, the stinger lines like "you have to go inside" and "to grind your skin", the horrifying skeleton, the screaming episode and the hard-hitting twist at the end all combined with tapping in to primal repressed memories we all have is a fantastic sight to behold. Cool Factor gets yet another 10. The fictional puppet show is as engaging as it is creepy and the way it plays on things like Public Access, internet culture and puppetry all combined to present a tale of contemporary horror is as stylish as it is unsettling. Weirdness gets an 8/10. The messed up puppets saying creepy things and all the crazy crap that happens throughout is pretty freaky, but nothing too outrageous happens that can't be explained by a bunch of people having very vivid imaginations and being very suggestible. Now, if this were the television adaptation with the freaky messed up tooth monster this would be a perfect 10. Fun gets a 9/10. We go on a little adventure piecing together the mystery of this imaginary show and almost feel like we're recovering a lost memory ourselves. I almost wish Candle Cove was a real show, without all the horrible supernatural freakishness going on IRL. Uniqueness gets a 10/10. We haven't seen anything like this before or since, from the concept of the show to the way it was all laid out. You don't get to see many "Lost Episode" pastas about entirely made-up shows. An exception would be "Happy Appy" but dear god, there's simply no comparison. Total Score and Summary Weekday Score = 44 Weekend Score = 47 Total Score = 91 If this story were a car, it would be a BMW sedan. Stylish and luxurious but also practical and efficient. As close to perfect as you're probably ever going to get. Jeff the Killer Plot Synopsis: A young boy's family has just moved into a new town. The boy has to deal with a group of sadistic bullies with his brothers, while also struggling against his own inner rage. Weekday Scores Quality is very low, just barely earning 3/10, and that's being generous. The author has a small vocabulary, regularly misuses word, struggles with basic grammar and spelling and is very bad at descriping things in anything more than a basic, matter-of-fact way. The prose feels incredibly juvenile. There are pornographic fanfics written better than this. Pacing is dismal and gets a 1/10. The story only has less than a dozen scenes and barely more than five set pieces, yet it takes an incredibly long time to get going. Paragraph after paragraph is spent describing nothing of value, things that should only take a sentence to describe take nearly an entire page, and overall it takes the author a very long time to describe very little. Structure gets another 3/10. The massive textwalls piled on top of each other don't take for comfortable reading and it's easy to lose your place if you take a break, which you'll almost definitely want to because it goes on for ages. There are no chapters, no headings, nothing. This would all be excusable if the story was short but it's incredibly long for a Creepypasta. This isn't a story you can sit down with a mug of coffee and enjoy before you go to work. You'll need to set aside 20-40 minutes to get through this beast. Practicality also gets a 3/10. Nothing in the story is even remotely realistic. We've got suburban bullies with guns who take an entire house of adults hostage, we've got people getting severe chemical burns from vodka and Clorox, we've even got people losing their eyelids and having their mouths carved open but nothing bad happens. Characterization gets a 2/10. The characters are virtually non-existent and feel more like props that exist to activate a single plot point and then either disappear or die. This would be excusable if there were an interesting, high-concept narrative or even a single character who we could relate to but we don't have that. Some very simple quirks or character traits could have salvaged this but there's just nothing there. Weekend Scores Scares gets a 2/10. I guess there's something universally scary about being stabbed with a knife or burned with chemicals but the story's complete lack of realism or belivability combined with the fact that virtually nothing supernatural or even that unordinary even happens and you have a recipe for a very bland, boring story that's less scary than a pile of corn. Cool Factor gets a VERY generous 4/10. I suppose there's something cool about the character given that enough people liked him to put him in more stories and copy him, but Jeff doesn't do much for me personally. He looks kinda cool, sure, but his absurd origin story combined with the fact that there's nothing supernatural or unique about him kills it for me. Weirdness gets a 1/10. This is an extremely low-concept story. Jeff's face getting messed up is certainly weird but everything else is very grounded. The problem is, it's a combination of "grounded" and "ridiculous" that makes everything feel fake and terrible. Fun gets a 2/10. Not much happens here, and while there *are* some moments that could be fun in concept, the crappy prose and droning, agonizingly slow and repetitive narration makes it a miserable slog. Worst of all, Jeff isn't even "Jeff the Killer" until the very end, most of the time he's just boring, plain Jeffrey Woods. Lame! Uniqueness gets a 1/10. Even before everyone started copying this story, it was basically a mishmash of slasher cliches and bad anime tropes. Not to mention it was partially plagarized from a YouTube video. The only reason I'm not giving it a zero is because there weren't really any creepypastas in particular like it. Total Score and Summary Weekday Score = 12 Weekend Score = 10 Total Score = 22 If this story were a car, it would be some kind of unholy fusion of a Toyota Prius and a Ford Pinto. Inexplicably popular and spawns copycats, but also a clunky junk heap that explodes when bumped too hard. Jeff the Killer 2015 A Plot Snyopsis isn't necessary because it's basically the same as the original, just better written. There *are* a few major changes to the plot, but I can't really get into them without going into spoilers. Also, to be clear: I'm reviewing the story in its current state, not when it was originally released. Weekday Scores Quality gets a 9/10. Not only is the writing improved on a technical level, the author's skill with prose, narrative and dialogue shines here. Great lines, vivid imagery, clever dialogue, it's all just wonderful. The disparity in quality between the 2011 version and this story is like a slap to the face, that's how powerful it feels. Pacing gets an 8/10. Though it's about as long as the original JtK creepypasta, it flows from scene to scene much better, and the things that happen have more weight and impact. You actually feel like things are happening, rather than vast amounts of time are being spent telling you crap you already know or don't care about. Structure gets a 10/10. The story is now seperated into chapters which makes it extremely comfortable and convenient to read. The journey from start to finish is a smooth, comfortable ride that never feels painful or grinding. Practicality gets a 7/10. It's pretty much just the previous version of the story but less stupid. Many of the absurd, impossible events of the 2011 version are omitted or change wholesale so they can vaguely resemble something that could feasibly happen in the real world. It's far less headache-inducing now. Characterization also gets a 7/10. Everybody gets something to do and some important role in the narrative, however slight. The characters feel like real, living people and not exposition dispensers and the setting is actually given some much-needed color and flavor in this version, with various facilities and buildings in the town described in an interesting and fun way. Weekend Scores Scares get a 4/10. This story just simply isn't that scary. The people who die pretty much deserve it, and it almost feels more like a bleak, suburban tragedy more than a horror story. It isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I don't fear the main character as much as pity him. Without getting into spoilers, it really sucks to be Jeff in this version. Cool Factor gets a 5/10. Without the massive plotholes and bad grammar Jeff is finally given a chance to shine, but even though he's got a nice bit of goth aesthetic going on he's still a fairly grounded and ordinary character. He's not exactly a Slenderman or even a Jason Voorhees. The setting gets a bit more stlye and flavor too, with the mention of a still active video rental store and some interesting scenery but not enough to put the story over the top. Weirdness gets a 4/10 too. Everything that happens in this story is very grounded and downright realistic at times, to the point that Jeff's iconic facial deformities are toned down too. There's nothing particularly strange or freaky about this version of Jeff, which is a bit of a shame. Apparently the sequels do a bit to rectify this but I haven't read them. Fun gets a generous 5/10. Again, without the clout of bad writing the character gets to shine but it turns out without some creative freedom there isn't much illumination going on. There's not a lot of bloodshed or supernatural freakiness in this story. Again, it almost feels like a depressing drama rather than a horror story. Uniqueness gets one more 4/10. Which I think is very fair, considering this story is technically the third rewrite of a completely different story, not counting the dozens of other rewrites in the contest that spawned it. Also considering this story came out years after Jeff the Killer became famous for its thousands of copycats. Still, that's not the fault of the story itself, so I think we can give it a bit of a pass. Total Score and Summary Weekday Score = 41 Weekend Score = 22 Total Score = 63 If this story were a car, it would be your mom's utility vehicle. Practical, functional and does everything it absolutely needs to, but not very exciting or stylish. Which, to be honest, was exactly what the community probably wanted at the time. In Closing This post is kind of a "proof of concept" for the Creepscore. None of the reviews are super detailed and the actual plots of the stories are glazed over, and the scores are admittedly pretty arbitrary, but it was really fun to write. Try picking out a creepypasta you like or hate and running it through the CreepScore, see how much fun you have! and here's a question for the readers: When I do reviews in the future, do you think I should use the CreepScore, or save it for its own seperate posts? Category:Blog posts